I went to read the article hoping that it would shed light on some nitty-gritty internals of the Free(or any other)BSD kernel and tell a story.

The story would be, of course, about how the brave and bold developers undertook a journey to add something to the kqueue mechanism, or fix a bug in it, or increase its performance, or improve its scalability, and how on their way there they hit the legendary, impenetrable Mountain of Technical Debt. How they tried to force their way over the mountain first, but how the dangers and the cold drove them to try to go in depth, via disused tunnels made by some hard-working fearless people many moons ago. In there, our brave team discovers long-decayed badly burned bodies, rusted tools, and fragmentary diaries made by some of those people.

They learn that the hard-working tunnelling people undertook a quest not unlike their own; they also felt that the Mountain of Technical Debt could actually present an opportunity to enrich themselves, and while mining it for Bugfixes and Improvements here and there, they accidentally awoke an Ancient Evil of Regression-Rich Behavior, the Mother of All Heisenbugs.

The hard-working tunnelling people were no strangers to the battle, and they faced the enemy, but it overpowered them with Crippling Regressions and Massive Burnout. Only a few survivors lived to tell the tale, and while what they told was confusing, the clear message was to avoid the Mountain and never approach the tunnels again. At least this was what everyone remembered, but almost everyone forgot what evil fought them and drove them out.

Our heroes realize that their quest has suddenly become much more dangerous than they thought, but they don't want to stop halfway, and they can be hard-working and hard-fighting too, and their tools are much more superior than those of their predecessors. They also think that they are much more resistant to burnout. Of course they go on, and eventually they meet the creature. Each attempt at improving kqueue yields such obscure regressions and bugs elsewhere in the system, that half of the team succumbs to Burnout unleashed on them despite youth, vigor, tools, and strength. Two brave souls, armed with the best debuggers, fuzzers, and in-depth code analyzers, manage to escape the Mother of Heisenbugs, wounding it, and damaging some of the Mountain itself. They describe their findings in a much more coherent way than their surviving predecessors have managed to, and conclude that the Mountain and the creature cannot be defeated on their home ground, not until a viable replacement arises which will be compatible with and and all the quirks the software grew to rely on. This replacement would starve the creature and the Mountain would erode.

The story of the kqueue Replacement Building would be a separate one, in a different genre, with our brave heroes acting as wise advisors to the new cast of protagonists, detailing challenges they all run into, and how their combined wisdom, intelligence, and superb teamwork and camaraderie help them overcome hardships — sometimes barely, but still.

Needless to say, the article failed me greatly. And it didn't even make an attempt to describe where the debt was!